Credibility is a factor that greatly affects the success of a business and how entities are perceived by others. Credibility is derived from many different sources and from many different factors. Some such sources include blogs, customer reviews, professional reviews, surveys, and any publicly viewable posting. Some such factors include individual experiences, name recognition, and quality of goods and services. Credibility is spread by word-of-mouth, print publications, and published online posts.
The Internet has made the posting and dissemination of credibility information easier than ever before. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and CitySearch have provided a platform with which each and every individual can influence the credibility of an entity, where the entity can include an individual or a business. People look to these sites because they trust what their friends, peers, or fellow consumers have to say. Also, these social media sites disseminate the credibility information in real-time. In other words, as soon as credibility information is posted to a social media site, that information is viewable by any other user of the site. Therefore, postings on these social media sites can have a significant impact on an entity's credibility, as these sites reach very large audiences in a relatively short period of time.
Consequently, entities are now taking more active roles in managing their credibility online. Specifically, entities monitor various websites in order to determine what others are saying about them. From these postings, targeted entities can identify what they are correctly and what they are doing incorrectly. Additionally, entities can respond to the postings to address complaints, provide customer support, and promote new goods and services. By identifying complaints as they occur in real-time or substantially contemporaneously therewith and responding to the complaints, an entity can improve its image or reputation for the purposes of realizing greater profitability, larger number of repeat clientele, better brand recognition, etc. Specifically, an entity can manage its credibility before it is too late by rectifying complaints before they are absorbed by potential future clientele that would then be dissuaded based on the absorbed complaints.
However, entities usually do not have sufficient resources to allocate to credibility management. In many instances, credibility management involves a manual process whereby the entity continually monitors different websites to view the latest credibility information. Due to the sheer number of different websites and volume of posts, the entity will often be unable to ingest every posting and respond in kind. Moreover, by the time the entity comes across a particular posting of interest, the entity may be too late to respond or be unable to respond as the window to respond may have closed.
Accordingly, there is a need to assist entities in managing their credibility online. There is a need to provide to a particular entity automated notification of postings that impact the credibility of that particular entity. There is a need to provide such notification in an omnipresent manner such that the particular entity is notified of any such postings irrespective of the site on which it is published. There is further a need to provide such notification in real-time so that the particular entity that is the target of such postings can respond to the postings to mitigate the detrimental impact that such postings can have on the credibility of the particular entity if the postings are left unaddressed over time.